The role of the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) is evolving to keep pace with today’s dynamic business landscape. No longer just a growth enabler and market strategist, the CRO now plays a pivotal role in driving long-term, profitable growth and exceptional customer experiences. By implementing scalable solutions, leveraging data insights, and championing innovation, the CRO helps steer the organization toward sustained success.
This evolution has expanded the objectives of the customer experience function. Based on insights from customer experience leaders, three top objectives are now driving this shift:
- Maintain profitable growth while matching customer expectations for faster and enhanced experiences
- Operate at scale as new business models develop, customer touchpoints skyrocket, and brands expand
- Consolidate, understand, and benefit from increasingly complex data residing in disparate, disconnected systems
Achieving these goals requires seamless collaboration across the entire organization—from Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) to marketing to IT—enabling teams to act on real-time insights. The days of siloed analysis are over; conquering these objectives demands that finance teams work in unison across every process.
Unprecedented challenges have made reaching these objectives difficult. External forces are compounded by ill-equipped internal systems and operational struggles, such as:
External forces:
- Rising customer expectations
- Increased global competition
- Evolving sales models & channels
- Supply chain disruption
- Hiring and retaining talent
Internal barriers:
- Data silos and poor data quality
- Pipeline predictability
- Customer retention
- Adaption to market trends
- Scaling growth
These challenges create an environment where customer experience teams must simultaneously manage supply and demand challenges, after sales service and support issues and adapt to evolving sales and marketing models and strive to increase competitive presence in a global market —often while working with incomplete data and customer retention issues. This tension underscores the need for new approaches for customer experience with real-time insights and cross-functional collaboration at the core of future success.
Let's summarize what you've learned:
- The role of the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) plays a pivotal role in driving long-term, profitable growth, and exceptional customer experiences, thus helping steer the company towards sustained success.
- Customer experience teams face several external forces, including rising customer expectations, the reality of a more competitive global market, dynamic sales models, supply chain disturbances, and the undercurrent of having to hire and retain quality talent.
- Internal barriers for CROs include data silos, predictive pipelines, customer retention, market adaptation, and scaling growth.